Talking exclusively to Digital Spy, the Lincoln Burrows star recalled just how close he came to cracking his skull open in the shocking incident.

"I think I was in shock, so the scary factor disappeared," he said. "I was running into a prison and there was an explosion above my head.

"The pain I felt wasn't pain like a knife slowly cutting into your arm, it was much more. It's very hard to articulate what kind of pain it was – but I rested down on one knee and I remember thinking, 'What the f**k was that?' And blood was just pouring out."

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Explaining that he knew something was wrong at that point, Dominic said his stuntman looked at him "like he had seen a ghost".

"I said to him, 'What's going on?' And he wouldn't tell me what the f**k was going on. He eventually said, 'Your skull. It's split. I can see to your skull in two places.'

"And then I saw this shadow to the left of my face and I thought, 'What is going on here?' And it was my nose, which had been smashed to the other side."

After "going through a very calm state" because they were working in a remote location, Dominic revealed he "had a moment of thinking, 'Oh I am probably going to die here'".

"It was bizarre, but I just assumed that I was going to pass out at any moment," he went on. "I thought the skull was cracked, blood was going to leak into my brain and I was going to pass out – and I wasn't going to wake up again.

"But I was very calm and my beautiful girlfriend Anna; she was there to support me. Within five minutes I realised what was going on. I stood up and said, 'Get me to a hospital'."

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Dominic explained that after his operation, the plastic surgeon said he was "a very lucky man" and "should have died".

"Because of my build and playing years of rugby, I have this thick neck, so that held my neck in place when the iron bar fell on me," he continued. "The only real injury I have still is whiplash. Apparently, I have extra layers of skin around my skull, so that prevented the bar from actually cracking my skull.

"Within two or three days, I was ready to get back to work. My recovery was extraordinary. Within a couple of weeks, I was fine. Wentworth [Miller] was tremendous support and he was greatly concerned about my health. I was just a very lucky guy."

Aside from his terrifying ordeal, Dominic also revealed he was "over Prison Break" by the end of season 4...

"It had been a long process of shooting 22 episodes a year and my creative juices were spent, so I was ready to go onto a different journey," he recalled.

"The fact that we had eight years to think about it, it was a novelty in a way going back and seeing how things were."